Scores of readers chided us for using Grant Wood’s American Gothic on our November cover to illustrate a story about divorce: Don’t we know that the pair in the painting are father and daughter, not husband and wife? We could hardly have gotten more letters if we’d identified Emanuel Leutze’s best-known painting as Jefferson Crossing the Delaware .

For the last several years Douglas Brinkley has been working on a massive illustrated narrative, The American Heritage New History of the United States , to be published this month by Simon & Schuster. This essay is adapted from the introduction.